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This issue we asked out experts: What tool do you find essential, couldn’t live without and why? And no, you can’t all say Emacs… Jonni Bidwell Well, I never leave the house without Chrome, but that’s another story. As far as FOSS goes, for me it’s all about the little things so often taken for granted: grep, ping, tail, lsof and nano (because sometimes vi is too hard) can solve so many problems. Also MPD controlled by phone is the badger’s nadgers.
Neil Bothwick Well I do use Emacs, but… I’m not sure there is anything so essential. There is so much choice in the free and open source world that if anything disappeared I’d be able to find a usable alternative. Having said all that, I’d be hard pushed to do without ZShell running in screen session over SSH.
Sean Conway Mozilla Firefox is the go-to FOSS for me! I cut from Microsoft’s SuperMarioNation Internet Explorer software when AOL released Netscape. I was a last holdout with that, staying with the web browser until it reached its end of life. A weaning to Firefox was the alternative. No amount of Chrome will give me cause to change.
The best of FOSS Today, we’re celebrating the best of FOSS and championing the 100 best open source software projects. Software that you must have and shouldn’t miss out on. From big-names like LibreOffice to the tiniest tools such as rtorrent, we’re running a catalogue of our top 100 must-have tools – and it even includes 70 that will work on the old and new Raspberry Pi! Of course, if you really love a piece of software, why not contribute to it? That’s the real beauty of open source: the ability to get involved with the most exciting or your most loved projects, whether big or small. We’re sure we’ve missed out on some favourite tool or project here, and we’re also sure you’ll let us know what that is. So make sure you email us and we’ll let everyone know Mailserver on page 12. But what use is software without something to run it on? For once we have three systems that come with Linux preinstalled in our Reviews section starting on page 17. We have a new HP workstation-class laptop, a Dell workstation desktop and the latest Chromebook from Acer. It’s certainly a sign of the time that we’re able to run regular system reviews with PCs that have a flavour of Linux as a default OS option. I’m also excited that we’re interviewing Peter Coates on how the British NHS is using open source in its infrastructure on page 44. Alongside this a feature on how you can not only run a business with open source, but how a business can deploy and maintain open source systems on page 48. We’ve got a new sysadmin’s coding series from Dr Chris Brown on page 84 while another Brown: Jolyon Brown takes the reins of Administeria on page 56 and Jonni looks into MariaDB on page 88. So enjoy the issue and we’ll be back with more next month!
Les Pounder The Arduino project is very dear to my heart. It started the Maker movement with art students in Italy, and thanks to its pricing and ease of use it’s become a huge success. Children and adults around the world have built projects great and small thanks to the blue PCB and its great set of resources.
Mayank Sharma VirtualBox! It’s taken the fear out of testing beta software and unfamiliar distros. I can create isolated environments using geekier solutions such as OpenVZ and LXC, but I still prefer the idiot-proof VirtualBox and save all my geekiness for tinkering with whatever it is that I need the virtual environment for.
Neil Mohr Editor neil.mohr@futurenet.com
Subscribe & save! Digital and print, see p34
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April 2015 LXF196 3
Contents
See page 11 for full details.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Reviews HP ZBook 15u G2.............. 17 Squeeze workstation power into a laptop and add a dash of Linux on top. Magic.
Dell Precision T5810.........18 Put a workstation in workstation’s clothing, then add a dash of Linux on top. Also magic.
The
BEST 100 Linux tools The best FOSS that you can’t afford to miss p36
A workstation-class desktop to make Linux fly like it deserves!
Acer Chromebook 13........19 A new Chromebook that’s packing a new Nvidia Tegra K1, can it cut the mustard?
Roundup: Anonymising distros p28
AMD FX-8320E.................. 20 A ‘budget’ octo-core CPU from AMD might grab your attention, but should it?
If you can spot the eight cores from here, you’re better than we are.
Tiny Core 6.0......................21 Tiny by name, tiny by nature. The latest evolution of the minimal Linux distro.
NetRunner 14.1................. 23 An updated release of a distro that makes KDE enjoyable, even for Mint users!
Opera 27............................. 24 Yuck, proprietary software! The question is whether Opera can do better than Firefox?
Philips 4K display............. 26 4K is here, the Linux desktop is ready, so where are all the affordable monitors?
Dying Light.........................27 A city terrorised by brainless, shambling humans getting in your way. Bath, on Fridays.
Interview I could take, consider, implement, and share. FOSS was a revelation! Peter Coates on open source in the UK’s NHS p44
4 LXF196 April 2015
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On your FREE DVD Mint 17.1, Kodi 14, Scientific Linux, TinyCore and more!
The best distros money can buy. PLUS: 164-page Android eBook
p96
Treat yourself or a loved one to an LXF subscription! p34
Don’t miss...
Linux in business.................. 48 How you can run a successful Linux business supporting and running FOSS for all.
School of Guitarix................... 52 Mix pre-amps and amp models with effects and emulations, and service society by rocking.
Coding Academy
Tutorials NTP Time gentlemen!............... 68
Kernel hacking....................... 84 Dr Chris Brown is back in a regular series of system programming tutorials, kicking off with kernel system calls, which will provide the grounding in C and Python.
Sean Conway explores everything NTP based, so you’ve got no excuse for missing that dentist appointment.
Raspberry Pi Build a Tor box . ................ 71
MariaDB.................................. 88 Jonni Bidwell runs off hand-in-hand with MariaDB, escaping the evil clutches of Oracle to live in a freer MySQL world with his first database love. aka an introduction to MariaDB.
Mayank Sharma trusts no one! So he’s built a Pi-based Tor box in his lead-lined safe of solitude somewhere in India…
Regulars at a glance News.............................. 6 Subscriptions............34 Back issues................66 The Biq Ubuntu phone is finally here
Subscribe to our digital edition or
Why do you want to make us sad?
and then it was gone, in a flash sale.
we’ll make you use an Apple iPhone!
Make us happy and buy a back issue.
An odd way to launch a phone!
Mailserver....................12
Sysadmin....................56 Mr Brown takes the helm of
Issue LXF191 is looking for a home!
Next month................98.
The Stallman alternative universe
Administeria after an 88 episode run
It’s Pi-mageddon! We’re digging up
controversy rumbles on, Jonni is
from Dr Brown. Kicking off taking a
the best Pi projects for old and new
awful at history and people still love
look at CoreOS and Ansible.
boards, plus so much more.
us it seems, awww.
User groups.................15
HotPicks.....................60
Les Pounder dons his woggle and
but he’s not invading the Ukraine, oh no, he’s too busy invading GitHub to Captured for you: Abiword, GParted,
Shhh, don’t tell anyone but Alex
Handbrake, Stellarium, Gnome
Tolstoy has been testing anonymising Battery Bench, Krita, Albert, Xonotic, distros, but we’ll never know.
X-Moto, TLP and MDP.
Neil Bothwick trusts no one! So he’s encrypting his entire hard drive, here’s how.
Linux kernel Startup and standby......... 76 Networking Build a home router......... 80
grab the hottest picks known to man!
Roundup.....................28
Ecryptfs Encrypt everything!.......... 74
Jonni Bidwell trusts everyone! He just wants to be able to get his PC to sleep.
Alexander Tolstoy might be Russian,
celebrates the Pi Jamboree.
Cry me a river, NSA.
Our subscriptions team is waiting for your call.
www.tuxradar.com
Build and configure your own router for the geeky buzz and benefits, improved VPN security and total control. So says Jonni.
April 2015 LXF196 5
Newsdesk
This ISSUE: Ubuntu Phone
ElementaryOS
GPG funding
#!++
Canonical phones home
Ubuntu Phone is finally here The first Ubuntu Phone might not be all that, but it’s a promising start.
I
t’s been a long time coming but the world’s first Ubuntu Phone has been released. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition has recently gone on sale and it looks like there was plenty of pent up demand for a Canonicalflavoured handset. Although so far it has only been sold in limited ‘flash sales’, the first such sale completely sold out in under an hour. It bodes pretty well for Canoncial’s fledgling mobile operating system, especially considering that the actual phone isn’t anything too special. It comes with a
and the apps we’ve installed on them. Rather than laying out all the apps separately in grids as with Android and iOS, Ubuntu Phone is bringing in the revolutionary idea of “Scopes”. Ubuntu Phone is looking to integrate apps and services via Scopes into an easy to use interface, so users don’t have to scroll through screens of icons. For example the NearBy Scope will aggregate local services centred around where you are and what you’re doing, giving you reviews of local restaurants nearby, as well as the weather in your area. We’ve been told that we can expect some bigname apps appearing on the new mobile operating system. When asked Cristian Parrino, VP of Mobile at Canonical, what sort of apps and Scopes we can expect in Ubuntu Phone, he replied “Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Time Out, Yelp, as well as community developed apps working on Spotify, Dropbox. Lots. Just about every digital platform, in some cases the top brand, others from valid alternatives”
The BQ Aquaris Ubuntu Edition is the first of many Ubuntu Phones... we hope.
“Launching a new product is a journey, this is the first step.” 4.5-inch qHD (960x540) display, a MediaTek quad-core Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1.3GHz and 1GB of RAM. It also features a 5-megapixel front camera and an 8-megapixel rear camera, which aren’t bad specifications by a long shot, but not something to get terribly excited about, though perhaps the relatively low price of €169.90 (around £127) helped drum up interest. A number of networks in Europe such as amena.com, Giffgaff, and Portugal Telecom will offer SIM bundles with the BQ Aquaris Ubuntu Edition. What is worthy of interest is Ubuntu Phone itself, a mobile operating system with plenty to offer and set it apart from Apple and Google’s offering. Ubuntu Phone looks set to shake up the way we interact with our phones
6 LXF196 April 2015
Scopes are an innovative new interface feature that Canoncial hopes will make Ubuntu Phone stand out from the crowd.
www.linuxformat.com
Almost 1,000 apps from big names around the world that are coming to Ubuntu Phone. It seems to us that the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition isn’t really aimed at the mainstream consumer and is instead aimed at developers, with Canonical keen to get an Ubuntu Phone into the hands of app makers as quickly as possible. What will be interesting to more mainstream consumers is the upcoming Meizu handset. The Chinese smartphone manufacturer signed an agreement with Canonical late last year, and it looks like its upcoming Meizu MX4 , will be Ubunutu-flavoured. This handset is expected to feature far more impressive high-end components: “octa-core” – quad-core Cortex A17, quad-core Cortex A7 – MediaTek MT6595 SoC, 5.36-inch 1920x1152 IPS display, 20MP camera, 4G-LTE and 2GB of RAM. If the specifications are correct, then we should see an Ubuntu Phone that can go toe-to-toe with flagship devices from Apple and Android manufacturers. When asked Parrino told us that “launching a new product is a journey, this is the first step”, and that for the time being Canonical is focusing on early adopters who are bored of iOS and Android, rather than fighting for shelf space among more well known brands. Meizu’s Ubuntu Phone could be the start of the real fight.
Newsdesk open source funding
ElementaryOS gets into hot water
Poor choice of words pits elementaryOS against its users.
W
ener Koch hasn’t been the only one to struggle raising funds. The stylish distro elementaryOS latest version may have been downloaded over 2 million times, but it seems 99.875% of those, download it without paying a single penny. As with other Linux distros elementaryOS is free to download, but also asks for voluntary donations to help fund the project. Previously when downloading the ISO of the distro, a text box was included where you could type in an amount of money you’d like to donate, with $10 being the default setting. In a bid to get more donations it has now changed the download process, with four buttons ($10, $25, $50 and Custom) which you need to select before you download. If you’d wish to download for free you need to select Custom and then type in $0. While the additional hurdle to download elementaryOS is minimal, we can at least sympathise with the team’s plight of getting funding. However, what didn’t help was the rather accusatory blog post (http://blog.elementary. io/post/110645528530/payments) that accompanied the news which managed to rile up elementaryOS’s fans. A particularly ill judged line
stated that “We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.” It has since been deleted, but the internet’s memory is long, and supporters of elementaryOS quite rightly didn’t like the accusation.
Have the folks behind elementaryOS taken their supporters for granted?
open source funding
Newsbytes Is nothing sacred? If you’ve got a hard drive made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba or other top manufacturers then be warned: the U.S. NSA has apparently found a way of inserting spying software into those drives. Security firm Kaspersky discovered the software in PCs from over 30 countries, with the most cases being seen in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. http://blog.kaspersky.com CrunchBang, the lightweight distro that’s also known as #!, is no more, with Philip Newborough, announcing in a forum post titled ‘The end’ that “I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love.” The reason for the decision is apparently because Linux has moved on, and there’s no longer a place for CrunchBang. “I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value.” http://crunchbang.org Although Newborough feels there’s no longer a place for CrunchBang, others disagree. Almost as soon as the end of CrunchBang was announced, a new project cropped up, known as CrunchBang Plus Plus (or #!++). The aim is to continue the legacy of CrunchBang, keeping it light weight while getting a reskinned user interface and updated Jessie packages. https://crunchbangplusplus.org
GPG gets funded
Fundraisers come to the aid of Werner Koch, the man behind Gnu Privacy Guard that protects us all.
I
f you value the privacy and protection of your emails and use email encryption then there’s a good chance you use Gnu Privacy Guard, or software that’s based on it. Journalists, companies, dissidents and whistle blowers like Edward Snowden around the world use software, however it was recently revealed that the man behind the code, Wener Koch, was running out of the money. Although he continues to patch and update Gnu Privacy Guard from his home in Erkrath, Germany, in an interview with Pro Publica (http:// bit.ly/16uti0Z), Koch revealed that he was running out of money. A fundrasing campaing launched in December raised $43,000, quite a bit less than the $137,000 goal. However since the article highlighting Kock’s difficulties was
published a number of individuals and organisations have rallied to his support, pledging funds for the man behind the software so many of us use. The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative – that was established for just this eventuality – awarded him a grant of $60,000 and Facebook and Stripe (an online payment processor) have each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to the project. His donations page at https://gnupg.org/donate has also been inundated with donations, and if you’d like to thank Koch for his hard work on such an essential tool, please visit and give what you can.
www.tuxradar.com
CrunchBang is dead. Long live CrunchBang Plus Plus! Live Patching is coming to the Linux Kernel. Although there have been proprietary live patching features in the past, along with distros such as Red Hat and SUSE bringing their own implementations, the different approaches to live patching were proving problematic. Now a joint approach has been agreed on to create infrastructure for live patching, including an API for kernel modules containing the actual patches, and API/ABI for userspace to be able to operate on the patches.
April 2015 LXF196 7
Newsdesk Comment
LibreOffice 4.4 release Michael Meeks Recently we released LibreOffice 4.4. By the time you read this it should be ready for wide-spread home usage, and is well worth a try. For me the highlight is Jan Holesovsky’s work (for Collabora) on growing and encouraging the User Experience community. In this release lots of improvements have been made across the suite; such as crisping up the look of the default menu and tool-bars. This work was based on user statistics indicating which items are more frequently used. But if somehow your favourite icon is not visible by default – it’s only a couple of clicks to show it again. We have a new colour selector, an improved side-bar, better rulers, and we’ve finally finished making all dialogues dynamically resizable. Impress is also much improved, with a number of really odd quirks fixed in the Impress master page editing, and a set of pretty new templates to match. Naturally there are a slew of other new features. Interoperability is a key focus, with lots of work done on improving round-trip OpenXML support (for collaboration with less-enlightened users). Another major win is the inclusion of Google’s great Carlito and Caladea, fonts which provide metric compatibility for modern Microsoft documents, much improving layout. We also now interoperatate with OneDrive as well as recently SharePoint. One last good taste is the continued drive to rescue data from proprietary file formats and bring them into ODF: we now have filters for: Adobe PageMaker files and Sony e-Books. Do download it, have a play, and get involved.
Michael is a pseudo-engineer, semi-colon lover, SUSE LibreOffice hacker and amateur pundit.
10 LXF196 April 2015
Hitting the mirrors What’s behind the free software sofa? Mageia 5 If all has gone according to plan you should be able to download Mageia 5 by the time this issue goes on sale. Recently the second Beta of Mageia 5 was delayed, which could impact on the final release. The previous major version of the Mandriva fork was very well received, so we have high hopes for this release as well. Find out more at www.mageia.org. As long as there haven’t been any more delays, Mageia 5 should be available to download
ClearOS 6.6.0 ClearOS 6.6.0 “Community” edition is now available. The latest version of the CentOS-based distribution introduces WPAD, QoS, YouTube School ID support, an upgrade to the Intrusion Detection engine, and ISOto-USB key support. ClearOS is aimed at cloud servers and gateways for homes, hobbyists and small organisations. A handy web-based interface grants you easy access to the range of features ClearOS provides and you can find out more and download the latest realise at www.clearfoundation.com.
Netrunner 15 Netrunner 15 brings huge changes to the Kubuntu-based distro, and now comes with the KDE Plasma 5.2.0 desktop by default. This version has been redesigned from the ground up, so a fresh install is necessary. KDE Frameworks 5.7 and Qt 5.4 are
ClearOS brings a number of useful features and security tools for students and organisations.
included, along with a number of new applications and features. Find out more at www.netrunner.com.
V15 is a major update.
Ubuntu 15.04 Final Beta The final beta of Ubuntu 15.04 will be hitting the mirrors for downloads a few days after this issue goes on sale. If you’re a confident beta tester or you just can’t wait to see what’s coming with Ubuntu 15.04 then you can download the beta release from www. ubuntu.com. Make sure you back up all your files before you try it out.
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The final beta before the full release is available to download.
competition
An APPle WAtCH
Keep up with the times in terms of technology and style with this chance to own 2015’s must-have gadget…
5
APPLE WAtchEs MUST BE WON!
s
mart watches are one of the most exciting new technology categories around and there’s surely no more eagerly awaited product than the Apple Watch. Thanks to a combination of Apple’s innate ability to make the latest technology accessible and the unrivalled personalisation that wearable technology provides, the Apple Watch is at the top of many people’s wish lists. With an Apple Watch, notifications appear on your wrist, included apps
track your physical activity and exercise sessions, the built-in heart rate sensor enables you to monitor your workout performance, and fashionistas can customise the face of the watch to their heart’s content. Naturally, the Apple Watch also integrates beautifully with an iPhone and other Apple devices…
All you have to do to be in with a chance of owning one of these remarkable gadgets is answer the following question:
WHAt is tHe nAme oF tHe APPle WAtCH’s BritisH designer?
A steve JoBs B tim Cook C JonAtHAn ive If you think you know the answer, simply visit http://bit.ly/watchcompo to enter. Good luck!
enter online noW For Free At: http://bit.ly/watchcompo The closing date for entries is 1 May 2015. Only residents of the UK and Republic of Ireland can enter this competition. After the closing date, five winners will be drawn at random from the correct entries. Only one entry per household permitted; multiple entries will be disqualified. See www.futureplc.com/competition-rules for full terms and conditions.
Mailserver
Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA or lxf.letters@futurenet.com
More mind games
Letter of the month
Helping hand
Y
ears ago you published something that I have found very helpful. Actually lots of things; but this one in particular. I am sure you are not the only people to know about how to gracefully reboot a Linux computer with the GUI frozen, or with some similar problem, but I heard about this useful feature from you. It has gotten me out of a fair few hangs. Unfortunately, I have a poor memory for somewhat random sequences of characters, so I wrote a reminder through a small HTML file to use as my browser home page. Although creating the file did drill the sequence into my memory, this way it is always there. So, in the spirit of FOSS and Copyleft, I've created a trivial contribution to other people's enjoyment of computers, without the limitations of greed so often found in this world. Enjoy, and thank you. John Paterson, Australia,
filesystems that enabled proper directories were required". That may have been true of PCs, but Unix/Linux is a mini-computer operating system and directories were around in the 70s. Anthony Youngman, via email. Neil says: I did leave some small print that said “We realise someone else would have
shane_collinge@yahoo.com
12 LXF196 April 2015
Neil says: For those not in the know you can hold Alt and the SysRq key then slowly type REISUB to force a controlled shutdown. This accesses a lowlevel message system in the kernel, which will only fail if init has died or there's been a kernel panic. [No General Panic jokes – Ed.] And the file will reside forever on www.linuxformat.com/REISUB.html. Each key stroke does this: R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode. E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init. I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init. S: Sync all mounted filesystems. U: Remount all mounted filesystems in readonly mode. B: Immediately reboot the system, without unmounting partitions or syncing.
championed the philosophy, but as well as katana-wielding Stallman?“ I also said “this was just a silly academic exercise” so again, it was in no way serious, but entirely silly. Also I wasn't obsessing about Linux, but the concept of ‘open source’, so as you point out yourself BSD would have been included in that group
shane_collinge@yahoo.com
Neil Mohr imagines a world without Richard Stallman. Of course, it's interesting to imagine a world without open source, but RMS is nowhere near as important as he would have us believe. Open source was around long before the Free Software Foundation was created. And, being a completely European thing, there's no reason to assume Linux would not have appeared in the absence of a Richard Stallman. Finnish Linux, for instance, is based on Dutch Minix. And Apple et al would be fine – the BSD history has absolutely nothing to do with RMS – indeed, it pre-dates him (as does another major free project: Wikipedia [does it? – Ed?]). RMS started his campaign for Free Software in the late seventies. In fact, if you want to imagine a world without Linux, you only have to tweak the dates of the BSD lawsuit slightly. If it hadn't started, or had been settled a bit earlier, then Linus would have used BSD and Linux would never have been born. RMS may be important in the history of open source, but he was a child of his time and there were many others. This cavalier attitude to history is also shown in the article on filesystems, where it says "By the late 80s
www.linuxformat.com
and Apple, or to be more historically correct as that's so important, NeXT Step would have struggled to develop its BSDbased OS. So no, OS X and iOS wouldn't have appeared. But no, RMS disappearing from history wouldn't have stopped open source being a force in the world, but that was never my point.
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